The whole world is border: On the wall at the end of American expansion.
The actual West is on fire. The mythologized West is burning to the ground. Millions of acres are being laid to waste as a result of climate change. It's less American exceptionalism that American exemptionism - the idea that America was exempt from limits, exempt from social obligations, exempt even from death itself.
Historian Greg Grandin traces America's imperial journey from frontier to border wall - as the centuries-long expansion of force and capital that propelled US growth reaches the physical limits of possibility, the nation finds itself trapped by reactionary nativism and its own failures to imagine a future within its own borders.
Greg wrote the book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America from Metropolitan Books.
Guest
Greg Grandin
Greg Grandin is an historian, author and professor of history at New York University.
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